I think its pretty obvious what’s going on. The guy with the tie is watching OLD footage of a press release for a product that is supposed to be a full-sensory virtual reality chamber thing.

Judging by the tubes behind him, he was involved in the beta run of the product, either testing it or producing the product itself, and authorizing the tests. My guess is that the product, rather than being a proper virtual reality machine has actually teleported the consciousness of the players; Byron, Frig, Gravedust, Syr’nj, and Best, into an alternate fantasy realm.

The fantasy realm may exist on its own as an alternate dimension, or going by few words picked out of this comic, the fantasy realm that the main story takes place in may exist as a collective dream that is actually GENERATED by the “players” themselves.
Ultimately they are trapped in it, and need the big life support systems to keep them alive, while this guy tries to figure out how to get them out of it (i’m gonna say it has to be done inception style, where they have to coax the players into running the course of the dream, or because trying to wake them up out of it while they’re still in a collective consciousness state could have “dire consequences”) hence he is using a safer method of “logging in” to the fantasy world as Bandit, that has since been developed since the beta test catastrophy that left those people trapped in the “game/alternate reality”.
This ultimately is why Bandit is responsible for bringing all the characters together, and keeping them together whenever possible (obviously keeping best in the party was aborted when he went full asshole)

This is pretty much the only explanation I can figure out that would keep this still grounded in the fantasy. Sure it may be science fiction when you view it from the science fiction side, but it’s impossible to say whether that is actually a virtual world created on a computer, or if the guilded age universe actually exists and this machine sent them there, so it still is pure fantasy on that side of the equation.

I mean I’m lost as to what’s going on with the press conference. I get that they’re making fun of Joss Whedon, that there’s some cool stuff being marketed. I even get that Dadelus is looking at that footage because it might give him some insight. I, uh… I just don’t get why some internet dudes are gonna give him something he doesn’t already know by making fun of Joss Whedon and saying things about new products. As for what’s going on with the characters, I’ve gathered as much from before… but it doesn’t really explain the arcane stuff on the desk (musty tome, melted candles, colorful potions). Nice speculation, though.

*Shrug* T likes it. Also, given the large and growing number of people now doing webcomics “fo srs,” I respectfully suggest it’s an over-generalization to say that “nobody” among them likes QC. If nothing else, the fact that it’s consistently been one of the top ten most-read webcomics within only a couple of years or so after it began, means that webcartoonists can learn something about how actually to grow one’s webcomic into a successful business and make a living with it. That’s still something that most in the field, no matter how high-quality their writing and art or how dedicated their fanbase, have been unable to do, but (except for those truly seeing it as a hobby and nothing more) wish they could.

Also, please don’t think for a moment that Jacques doesn’t take his webcomic seriously just because he sells T-shirts based on it. He’s constantly experimenting with the art; he consciously rotates the cast so that characters no longer central to the main cast’s lives drop out and new ones come in. Just like in real life, unlike in so many fictional series where the exact same five or six people hang around with each other, and no one else, for years on end. He’s developed characters that readers feel passionate about (love or hate), and discuss them as if they were real. I think that makes Jacques a “serious” webcartoonist, whether you personally care for his work or not. (Not saying you have to, but extrapolating from yourself to “everyone” in the “serious” cartooning field is a stretch.)

“Nobody I know who does comics”. I never said it applied to everyone, just everyone I know personally and have asked.

And by “fo srs” I mean with a conscious effort to constantly improve.

There’s no need to get so defensive, I’m just sayin’. I read QC. I enjoy it, generally. His livestreams are helpful. I’m just of the opinion that the strip is lacking – yet adequate – in many key areas, mostly the flexibility and variety of the art and quality of the writing. That’s an entirely personal opinion – I’m not trying to pose it as ‘fact’. We all have different expectations.

At any rate, though, this is hardly the place for a discussion of the merits of an unrelated webcomic.

He’s not so hot on clothing beyond hoodies, jeans, and the occasional t-shirt/tank top. I get really annoyed when I think about his attempt to do Victorian clothing, for example. It’s hard to argue with success, I grant you, but come on. Ten seconds on Google image search and you’ve got all the clothing models you’ll ever need. Same with the lapels on sport coats, women’s business suits, the brims of (non-trucker) hats.

I think, if her eyes are actually open in panel 2, that she has incredibly tiny eyes…It really looks more like she’s gazing at the floor. Perhaps to not look at what HR is looking at… Her expression seems a bit uncomfortable, and her posture – look at it! She’s insecure or trying to hide something.

has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like what is this i dont even i thought this informal report might have some fresh insight on the day it all went so strange

I can’t believe that has a wikipedia page. It just goes to show you I haven’t looked hard enough to find the page about Kirk Camerons illegitimate orphan children, ironically being raised by religious organizations that aren’t christian.

…NEEEEVVVEEEER!!! *shifty eyes* Why would there be sexual references in gamer reviews?!

Wait wait wait… so if Byron and co were beta testers for that whole Bubble thing…. I assume that Payet is as well… but did they fail horrendously… or is there a failsafe that will allow their ‘real’ bodies to not die when they get ‘unplugged’… ya know… like that Matrix thingy they are hinting at? >.>

Just saying… does this mean they may in fact, return with a reboot?

I don’t care if we’re watching Matrix avatars… I fucking LOVE Frigg and Bandit and demand more of them. I can ignore that as long as I get to watch the awesome banter.

My take is that they’re being kept busy by being immersed in an artificial reality because whoever / whatever they are, they’re too dangerous not to be kept busy. Everything else is just byproducts of this endeavor; the games, the 3D controller. Sort of like how a lot of our technology has roots in military research. These products in turn continue to fund the Keep 5 Busy project.

Of course, there’s nothing as engaging as a world being manipulated by other people (IMHO).

Monotone World is a construct of a demonic mastermind, and Arkerra is the “real world,” but even worse, Arkerra itself is ALSO a construct of yet another (probably evil) mastermind…and now I have this image of the Crisis of Infinite Earths in my head, only waaaaaaaay LESS cool.

This is just needlessly stupid. All your stuffiness about how this was all part of the plan (which, as it happens, I don’t believe) doesn’t change the fact that you’ve run a beautifully drawn, compelling reimagination of a world we all know and love right into the ground. The new artist is not competent to fill the old artist’s shoes. The writing is just embarrassing. I’d say something about jumping the shark, but I’d be late to the party. I stop in once every couple of days to see how bad it’s gotten. Reading this comic is like rubbernecking at a traffic fatality–it’s horrifying, but you can’t look away. I’m a loyal reader, but only out of morbid curiosity.

Whiteboards are a truly horrible art medium, it’s pretty much impossible to draw anything good on them. As a result that’s the best I can manage without taking several hours. :)

(I posted this a while ago in the middle of a massive bunch of ranting about “how the comic had jumped the shark with the introduction of John Waltrip, and the new plots.” The idea being to invoke ridiculum ad absurdum.)

We’re all getting more than a little bit of whiplash from the recent pages. If this were a print comic, we could quickly get through this and see where they’re really going with the sudden scene cuts and strangeness.

While I don’t agree with your opinions on their writing, I can sympathize with the frustration that seems to fuel what you said. It doesn’t really help, but I hug you anyways.

Hrm. Maybe the guys in the tube are our lovable heroes, and they were the testers for the virtuball thing.

WHAT A TWEST.

Seriously, the plot thickens, and it’s getting really interesting. I’m wanting to see how this ends up. My money is it going the way of a .hack approach; the virtual self is the consciousness disembodied and virtualized while, due to some freak accident, the body is left in a comatose state until the two can be somehow re-connected.

Now that I think about it, I loved .hack//sign. If this is going for the same thing, it might be really awesome, especially if Byron and the others were in a state like Tsubasa, where they feel the pain and all that.

True. But I was simply making a guess and a comparison. Just because .hack//sign introduced the meta-story from the very beginning, doesn’t mean Guilded Age had to do the same thing.

While the .hack series as a whole has stated from day one that it was a show about a virtual world, even having references to it in the opening credits, Guilded Age has been running up until this chapter as simply being taking place in an alternate reality. This is the first chapter we’ve learned of it’s MMORPG status as “Kingdoms of Arkerra”, so introducing the meta-story early on would have diminished the WTF nature of the reveal.

But this is all pure speculation from what we’ve been getting since the beginning of this chapter. I’m sure enough theories and thoughts have been commented and revised or scrapped since the start of this chapter. We’ll find out eventually just what happened, and until then, let the speculation flow free.

Hey, hey, hey. I only posted that as a meta-joke. If *I* had to describe it, it’d be as “Bacta-tanks from Star Wars getting awkwardly groped on the subway by The Matrix while Code Lyoko and every fantasy game ever watch.”

Hence why I didn’t write an original metaphor and instead went with the meta-joke.

You guys ever read Caverns of Socrates by, I think, McKiernan? It’s got a similar basis. A roleplaying group trying a new style of VR gets trapped in a game, with no memory of their regular lives, (it’s explained) trying to finish this quest, while there’s the tech thriller of the dudes trying to keep life support going.

I’m done with speculation. I’m just curious as to how HR is the real villain as alluded to in the beginning of the chapter. He seems aware something went wrong in the past and is trying to fix it. Eh, he may be into virtual slavery and maybe they’re figuring out how to escape and he needs to stop it. Or, the road to hell may just be paved with good intentions… DAMN’T I’M SPECULATING AGAIN. You, you, you… curiosity piquers ( I apologize for my language).

It is never stated that Dedalus is the bad guy… most people just assumed that because it was him in the cover image.

However, it would make for very poor plotting to tell who the bad guy is right from the first page of a chapter.

My bet is the TRUE bad guy will appear/made clear later in the chapter and it will NOT be Deadalus.

Also, what concerns speculation, we are all forgetting that last we saw “the party” Syr’nj was just about to *queue goggles* “do science!” while saying that they “all have a choice”. It sounds very ominous and can probably have a heavy role in why we find them in the tubes now (in the case of the fantasy/medieval realm being real scenario).

First and foremost to see new artwork from him, of course. But also to read more Fourth World-type stories in that bizarre, alien writing style of his that isn’t remotely like real-life dialogue but is “unreal” in such a way that it’s fun as hell to read.

I’m finding the pattern of threes and word/number combinations throughout the update the fascinating part. Three geeks, combining three things in their sentences. (Concepticon=Concept/Convention/Decepticon) Menage a trois. And so on. It seems significant, considering that the geek’s dialogue reads strangely due to those elements. Big D’s dialouge also hits that something happened that day to affect how they’re talking.

I also have the theory that what we’re seeing with Best has already happened, That Big D here wasn’t watching the game in motion on the computer but recorded footage from Gastonia’s past.

If that’s the case, Past Present and Future may be having a giant menage a trois and affecting each other severely, due to some event either started by Big D or someone in Gastonia. It would perfectly explain why Game lingo and high tech started appearing in Gastonia and How Big D is looking at Best on a computer.

To add on to my theory, look at Geek#3 in the first panel. It seems like a random (if accurate) Joss joke, but it references the past, present and future. It also works in reference to the G4 interview and the hints we got there as to what Big D is doing.

This is a poetic and literary device known as a Tricolon, where you link together three related concepts in order to make your remark more memorable. Three is a good number for people to remember, fewer than three feels sparse, and more than three feels long-winded.

This is a fairly old concept as far as literature goes. Virgil (writer of the Aeneid and such) was a massive fan of them and used a lot – a good reason would be that his stories would have been recited by poets and performers on streets, and grouping your poetry into threes makes it much easier to remember the lines.

“The Bubble” was a TV show in the UK that ran for one series on the BBC a couple of years ago.

The premise is thus. Three “celebrities” (and by celebrities, it’s generally renowned standup comics, and journalists, rather than C-list hopefuls) are locked in a large house for a week. They don’t have TV, or mobile phones, or newspapers, or the internet. They don’t get any outside world access at all.

After a week has passed, they film a panel show, with David Mitchell as host (he’s pretty good.) the aim of the game is simple. Can you pick out real news stories from multiple choice options, where one story happened, and the others are fabricated jokes.

So, guys… Can we just skip ahead to the part where Best rocks the f*ck out? I mean, I like learning more clues about what may be happening and all, but I’m still pissed that the bird died. Those landsharks went too far.

I’m still holding out hope for the “real Arkerra somewhere” theory. Maybe by “things went so strange” he really means “The walls of reality shattered and these people got stuck on the other side.” That would explain the candles and book- he’s looking for a way to get these folks back, but if the tech had supernatural effects he’d need to call on supernatural forces as part of an extraction.

I’ll add my two cents worth: IMHO this webcomic is behaving much like a classic Hitchcock’s film, just when you are really sure a bomb somewhere is about to blow up…. the authors switch scenes.
And if you have never seen any of Hitchcock’s films, this is a pretty good thing and hard to do btw.
Sirs, you got a loyal reader here for a long time. (unless the bombs really does go off….)

Guilded Age does not claim ownership of any of the corporate branding that appears in this comic, nor does it claim any affiliation, partnership, or endorsement of any kind. They are used strictly as an artistic choice for the set dressing of the comic.